


Asylums

by spaze_cat



Category: Gorillaz
Genre: Canon Extrapolation, M/M, Phase Five (Gorillaz), based on canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:26:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23534536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaze_cat/pseuds/spaze_cat
Summary: How many chances had they already given him? Why is this time any different? He's never been much good at transparency, but the way he sees it, it's his only option left.By some miracle, they seem to agree.
Relationships: Murdoc Niccals & Noodle
Comments: 3
Kudos: 48





	Asylums

Patagonia’s quite a beautiful place, despite the circumstances.

For all his faults, Murdoc likes to think he has a pretty fair sense for it. Beauty, that is. It’s easy to find when it’s all external. Satan knows he hasn’t a shred of it in him, personality or otherwise. But that’s precisely what makes it easier to spot for him.

Noodle, for instance, is beautiful.

Not just in appearance, but in presence. The first human he’s seen in a fair amount of time (days, weeks, doesn’t really matter, time’s one of the world’s great lies). Like an angel come to save him, though he knows it’s not for his sake. She’d made a point to tell him so.

But still, she’s here, and that alone is more than he deserves.

“You lied to me,” she says, and her voice is like a prayer, even as it cuts open some old, scarred wound inside him. “To all of us. Again.”

“I do that,” he croaks. One foot in the grave, as usual, only this time he can feel which foot it is. His left one’s gone numb from the cold.

“Why?” She’s cross with him, more than she’s letting on. It’s understandable, given the sheer level of antics he’d pulled to get her here. He’d broken every last scrap of trust she may have had for him, not that she’d had much to begin with. She’d been the one to close his bank account, to refuse to help him escape, but even still confided in him her worries about 2D’s changing behavior, and what had he done with it? Used it to spin another lie, to save himself. “ _Answer me._ ”

“I can’t.” He tries to shrug, but his bound arms make it painful. He’s still strapped to Madge the yak. Her eyes flick to his wrists and back up so quickly he almost misses it.

“Can’t, or won’t?” she presses, unrelenting.

“Dunno,” he admits. She’s always been the best at squeezing the truth out of him.

“Let us know when you find out,” she says, allowing just a smidge of her anger to show.

“Did you get 2D’s soul back?”

“El Mierda is innocent,” she says. “He is immortal, but not a demon.”

“Still a criminal,” Murdoc says. “’S why I named him as my framer.”

“If he was, he has left that life behind,” she says. “One can only hope you take notes.”

“Got to get offa this beast before I can do that,” he says. His words slur a bit. He feels dizzy, wonders if he’ll pass out mid-conversation. “Could use some help.”

“I am still deciding whether or not you deserve it,” says Noodle.

“I don’t.”

She stands there for a few more seconds, and Murdoc looks away, giving her space to think. Eventually, she sighs and moves closer, begins to untie him.

“ _Kuso baka_ ,” she curses. “How did you manage to tie these so tight?”

“Years of practice,” he mumbles, getting yak fur in his mouth. “Try a blade.”

She reaches for it before he’s done speaking. ‘Course she has one on her. _That’s my girl._ He doesn’t dare say it out loud.

When she cuts the rope, he begins to slide. He really does try to hold on, but finds he’s weaker than he’d thought. Noodle has every right to just let him fall, but unlike him, she has honor. His weight’s no problem, given her genetic conditioning (and the fact that he probably weighs less than she does right now). His gangly limbs give her some grief, but she readjusts, throws his mostly limp body over her shoulder like a sack of malnourished, smelly potatoes, and carries on towards the large building they’d been beside. Evidently, it’s no longer an evil lair, but a wellness center.

Sometime later, after a well-needed bath has helped him regain feeling in his digits, she confronts him again. Corners him, really, since she’s given him no time to rest nor an escape route, but he’s too tired to run anyway. She’s stood in his doorway, as far away from him as she can be, and he watches her blankly from his too-soft bed.

“Was any of it true?” she asks, leaning against the frame.

“Almost none of it,” he admits. “Mostly bollocks. Did get arrested, though.”

“For parking fines.”

He isn’t surprised she’s done her research, nor that she hadn’t done it sooner. They all know what he’s capable of. He’d started out with a fairly believable lie. Meeting some shady bloke at a party who turned out to be a powerful drug lord? Well that was just another Sunday for him, wasn’t it?

“Quite right.”

“Your sentence was nine months,” she continues. “You would have been released the day you escaped. I fail to understand why you thought it was necessary.”

“Well I suppose the better part of it was done for attention.”

She regards him with an expression he can’t quite read, and it immediately puts him on edge.

“What?” he asks.

“That does not seem like something you would admit out loud,” she says, and her words are pressing uncomfortable weight against areas of his soul that he had, until quite recently, believed to be dead. “Perhaps some things have changed.”

“A near death experience will do that,” he says, unable to keep some of his old snark from coming through.

“Of which you have had many,” she counters. She finally takes a few steps inside the room. “They have never prevented you from deflecting before. What was so different this time?”

His first instinct is to lie (it’s been his instinct this entire time), but he ignores it. She doesn’t know it, but there’s just no room in his mind for that sort of stuff anymore.

Still, spilling his heart has never been something he’s been good at, or comfortable with. He wants her to know the whole truth, but that will require him to open himself fully, and he’s not ready for that just yet. What he can do for a start, he supposes, is tell her the gist of it.

“A healthy dose of humility.”

She says nothing, clearly waiting for him to go on. When he doesn’t, she frowns, takes a step back. But she’s still in the room.

“I was hoping for clarity.” _You shouldn’t have expected it_ , he thinks. Winces at his own thoughts, tries to give her _something_ more.

“I want to,” he admits, and it makes him feel vulnerable and small but he can’t bare _not_ to. “I do, love. I want you to understand what happened, why things are different.”

“Then tell me,” she says, and his heart aches at the plea in her voice. So, he hasn’t killed the last of her hope after all. “Surely you have accomplished far more daunting tasks in your life.”

“I really haven’t,” he says with a sad chuckle.

“I would understand if you could not tell the world,” she says. “I would understand if it were Russel, or even 2D—” He gives her a look, but she doesn’t stay in that territory for long. “—But I am the one that is here. I have fallen asleep in your arms when you read me bedtime stories as a child. I have trekked countless miles in hard terrain for you. I have witnessed you at your lowest points and still elected to save you. If there is anyone in your life who has earned the right to hear precisely why my efforts have not been in vain, it is _me!_ ”

The worst part is that she’s entirely right. That doesn’t make it any easier to say, but he must. Or else he really might lose her, and the rest of them, forever. She’s giving him a last chance, and he has no choice but to take it. To do otherwise would kill him.

“I’ve been shot at,” he says, his own voice sounding far away, “hunted by pirates, haunted by demons. Plastic Beach was a rough fucking go, but I never _really_ thought I might die. You know why? Because I was always sure to have someone around who would save my arse. Only problem is, I never saw it like that. Always thought it was my own spite that kept me alive, that I was the only one I’d ever need because of it.”

Her arms uncross. She takes a couple steps closer, deletes half the distance between them.

“I thought like that right up until I went sloshing about in that sewage drain. Covered in—” They both wince. “—Well. And the tunnels kept getting narrower and narrower, until I was on my hands and knees, then army crawling it, then wriggling like a worm. All the while the… _liquid_ , rising up towards my face, and then, well, I got stuck.

“I couldn’t move, and it was, was rising—” He gestures vaguely near his throat, doesn’t meet her burning eyes. “—It was hard to breathe, what with the fumes, and the… pan—” Some awful, scarred bit of his soul screams for him to stop, that he’s giving her an opening to hurt him. “—panicking. I was… forced to reckon with the idea that I might actually die like that, alone and covered in shit.”

She comes to sit on a chair beside his bed, and he hates the intense look in her eyes, how closely she’s listening (because she can tell he’s being serious), but he has to say it. She has to hear it.

“It finally hit me then, that there was no one left to save me, where there always had been, before. I thought of you three, and why you weren’t there. How it all came down to me; that I’d pushed you all away, treated you like rubbish, when you hadn’t done a thing to deserve it.”

_When all you three had ever done is love me._

Noodle doesn’t say anything for a while. He can tell she’s trying to assess whether or not he’s being sincere. Perfectly fair, given his record. Still, it’s an interesting feeling; her assuming he’s lying when he’s never been more honest in his life.

“You are not lying to me.” Framed a bit like a question, but also a command. An unspoken, _because I swear if you are…_

“No,” he says, wondering if there are more words he can say to prove himself, wondering if it would only make him sound guilty.

“Promise me,” she says, her face hard at work to not give a single thing away.

“That I’m not lying?”

“That you have changed,” she says. “That I can have some faith you will not resort to your old ways. That if we let you come back, you will try your best to prove to each of us that you can be better.”

They shouldn’t let him come back. Not because he’s incapable of trying, but because they are all so much better off without him.

“I’m not one to keep my promises, love,” he says. “You know that.”

“This is one you are going to keep,” she said, crossing her arms. He doesn’t understand why she’s fighting for this, why she wants it. Do the others feel the same? Murdoc knows at least one of them absolutely does not.

“And what might 2D think of this agreement, then?”

She frowns, just a bit. “2D is not here.”

“He doesn’t get a say?”

“You, of all people, are coming to his defense?”

“Near-death experience, remember?” He waves his hand as if to swat at the conversation. “Someone’s got to, now that you’re making ill-advised decisions for him without his input.”

“Did it occur to you that he might have had a say in me coming here at all?”

 _No, it hadn’t._ He would have bet his life on the precise opposite, actually.

They linger in a pregnant silence, until Murdoc reminds himself that he’s supposed to be trying.

“2D’s soul isn’t gone, by the way,” he says. “I’ve seen the video, all that confidence and happiness. It’s because I wasn’t there.” He looks up at her, and this time it’s her who’s reluctant to meet his eyes. “But you’d put that together already, haven’t you?”

“It has crossed my mind,” she admits.

“The things I’ve done to him, Noodle…”

“Are very terrible,” she finishes with a nod. “Worse than what you have done to the rest of us, one might argue. But it is his place to forgive you if he chooses, not ours. Certainly not yours.”

“ _Forgive_ —” He nearly scoffs. “And what if he _does_ go and do something stupid like that? The dullard…” It’s reflexive, and it comes out more affectionate than he intended anyways. Something Noodle seems to pick up on, because she doesn’t shoot him the usual disapproving look.

“Then you will have to spend the rest of your life feeling miserable because of it,” she says knowingly, and with a bite he feels keenly.

He sighs, lies back against the pillow between him and the headboard. Tries to make it look like he’s really thinking this one through, though they both know his mind’s been made up since she first made the offer.

“I promise,” he says, and it’s all she needs to hear.


End file.
